Ok, now that it’s August…August! How did that happen? It has been so hot and humid around here, but yesterday was freakishly cool and cloudy. It it rained in the morning and after a nap I trimmed the forsythia bushes outside my huge picture window. They’d been growing like crazy and bugging me and it was so nice to work outside when it wasn’t hot. After I finished I couldn’t help myself, I started pulling weeds.
Luckily, my friend Nan called and she and her husband Jim were in the neighborhood and were going to stop by. If she hadn’t called I probably wouldn’t have stopped til it got dark.
Today is warmer but there’s this large rose of sharon at the front of the house that I’ve been dying to dig up and transplant over to mom’s house. I’ve been patiently waiting til my knee got better and the plant grew and decided that today was the day.
It didn’t take long and I ended up transplanting four of them. I was very careful, not putting any pressure on my right knee. But then when I finished my knee was very unhappy. So now I’m sitting on the couch icing it. I feel like I’ve done plenty of things since the surgery on June 24th but I guess that digging holes is not the best idea at this time.
Luckily there’s nothing else I want to dig up right now.
Meanwhile…In June we got new gutters, which have fancy gutter guards so the whirly birds won’t land in them and clog them up. Kevin paid a down payment last year to a place called “Gutters and More” and the guys were supposedly going to turn up “after the last frost.”
They finally arrived late morning on June 17th. Just two guys in this truck and these big rolls of aluminum.
And here’s the amazing thing – the made the gutters! This is a gutter that has been formed out of the box there on the right, as the guy adjusts the aluminum.
Dang, I wish I could remember his name. He didn’t mind me videotaping him, and it was fascinating to watch the roll of aluminum go into the machine and come out a gutter. He measured as it went in order to get the size perfect. The video is short and I promise it’s entertaining.
Here he pulls the lever to cut the gutter off at the right spot.
This looked mighty dangerous to me. Who’d want to be up on a ladder at such and angle?
We have quite a bit of guttering and different levels and it was such a huge job. I think it was a pretty hot day, too, and I wondered how many days they’d be at it.
They took a break mid-afternoon but came back and worked and worked and as the sun started to set they were still going strong. It was almost dark by the end, but they’d somehow managed to finish it all in that one very long day.
Here’s what the cool gutter guards look like. We’ve had quite a bit of rain since they’ve been installed and they’ve worked perfectly. From a second-floor window you can look out and see whirly birds and other detritus sitting on top of the guards which I think is quite something. I which I could buy Bev some gutter with guards for her birthday because whirly birds in her gutters are one of the things she really dislikes intensely.
Ok, just one photo of darling Les and Riley, always so stressed.
And I’m pretty sure that’s all I have for June, here on the first day of August.
Ok then,
Mrs. August First Hughes.